Sen. Murphy: Republicans are just gun-control Darwinists at this point

posted at 1:21 pm on April 18, 2013 by Erika Johnsen

I guess I appreciate the honesty of the Republican caucus. They’ve just made it clear that they are just kind of gun-control Darwinists at this point. They just think that we should give a whole bunch of guns to the good guys and to the bad guys and let them shoot it out, and hope that the good guys win. That’s their agenda, and a lot of that was made plain today.

Well, that was a feisty enough bit of demagoguery to rival some of President Obama‘s preferred tactics. I’m pretty sure that the the good guys and bad guys just “shooting it out” and cavalierly hoping that the good guys win isn’t what Republicans have in mind in their gun-rights agenda, but in fact want to make sure the good guys are armed as a robust means of deterrence for the bad guys who are armed anyway — which on net balance would lead to less violence, not more. It’s already illegal for criminals to have guns, and as Sen. Jim Inhofe put it, most of yesterday’s legislation was “predicated on one assumption that somehow we think that the criminal element will single out this one law to comply with.” While Democrats are insistently laying claim to some sort of corner on “common sense” when it comes to gun rights, the legislation was not a solution for the problems it professed to be trying to solve; and if you’re trying to substantively move the debate in your direction, I doubt that these kinds of flippant misrepresentations of the opposition’s motives are going to help.

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